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He reported that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum said they had alerted the State Department about the possibly incendiary nature of some of Ibrahim’s tweets.

“The obvious question: Did the State Department look at Ibrahim’s feed before it was decided to give her this award, and did the State Department ascertain that she was indeed the victim of a Twitter hijacking?” Goldberg wrote, adding an update later noting that one source of his said State Department officials believed Ibrahim’s account was hacked .

Nuland was asked a question to that effect during her briefing with State Department reporters, according to a transcript from the State Department.

“Well, let me say that the way this process works, award recipients are nominated first by embassies around the world, then they are reviewed here in Washington,” Nuland said. “In the context of looking at her record, you know that she is a very big tweeter. She has tens of thousands of tweets. So these represent a small portion of those, so obviously, we’re doing forensics internally on how we didn’t catch it the first time. But as I said, we’re going to defer presentation.”

The Anti-Defamation League weighed in Thursday afternoon, praising the State Department for holding off on presenting the award.

“We commend Secretary John Kerry and the Department of State for taking this matter seriously, and holding in abeyance the award to Ms. Ibrahim,” said Abraham H. Foxman, the ADL’s national director, in a statement. “There is no courage, and there should be no honor, in propagating anti-Semitism. If it is ascertained that Ms. Ibrahim is responsible for these anti-Semitic messages, she is unworthy of U.S. recognition and the honor and award should be withdrawn.”